Greece’s opposition
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras said his party will respect European Union fiscal
rules and commit to targets on eliminating the deficit, in a further olive
branch to the country’s creditors as he moves closer to winning power.
“A Syriza government
will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced
budget, and will commit to quantitative targets,” Tsipras said.
Four days before a
general election, polls suggest Syriza is poised to defeat Prime Minister
Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy party. While voters are attracted by a platform
which includes opposing the terms attached to Greece’s bailout, investors have
been spooked by the uncertainty over the implications of a potential Syriza
victory.
Greek bonds have
delivered the worst returns in the last month among 34 sovereign securities
tracked by Bloomberg’s World Bond Indexes, while Greece’s benchmark Athens
Stock Exchange is the worst performing of all the major equity indexes over the
same period.
European Challenge
The Syriza leader, who
wrote a similar op-ed in Germany’s Handelsblatt this month, burnished his
European credentials, saying that his party’s platform, which would “put the
middle class back on its feet,” is the only way “to strengthen the eurozone and
make the European project attractive” to its citizens. Without such change, the
field will be open for the National Front in France and its allies to
capitalize, he said.
Samaras says Tsipras’s
demands will perpetuate uncertainty over Greece’s relations with its euro-area
peers and could lead the country out of the currency bloc. Polls for the Jan.
25 election suggest that his arguments have yet to resonate with an electorate
battered by a six-year slump that left more than a quarter of the workforce
without a job.
“If the Greek people
entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a
‘unilateral’ act, but a democratic obligation,” Tsipras said. “We must end
austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy.”
(Πηγή: bloomberg.com)
